ExpertFlyer Loses Award Data Access With Many Airlines

ExpertFlyer, a valuable tool for frequent fliers, has issued a statement today about losing access to several airlines’ award booking classes.

The tool has helped find award inventory on many airlines, and you can set alerts when award inventory is loaded. This has now gone with many airlines.

You can access ExpertFlyer’s page for airlines and award fare classes that are available using their service here.

ExpertFlyer’s Announcement:

ExpertFlyer Updates to airline award data

Due to ongoing issues in obtaining award data for some airlines, we have decided to remove airlines from the Award & Upgrade search tool whose award data is no longer available:

• British Airways (except for Gold Elite Awards)

• Qatar Airways

• Iberia

• Korean Air (only Saver award classes removed)

• KLM (only Saver award classes removed)

• Emirates (only Saver award classes removed)

• Etihad

• LATAM

• Virgin Atlantic

• Fiji Airways

• Icelandair

• Some of the smaller oneworld airlines

• Some of the smaller Skyteam airlines

Any award classes that are no longer available will have “(currently unavailable)” appended to their description in the Class Codes reference and when viewing any Flight Alerts for them. This also means that any active Flight Alerts for those award classes will no longer work. You are receiving this email because you have an active alert for an award class of one or more of the affected airlines. You can view your active alerts by logging in and clicking on the View Saved Alerts link under Alerts on the left side of the page. No other data or alert types for these airlines have been affected.

Conclusion

It is unclear if airlines stopped pushing this information on some GDSs where ExpertFlyer has acquired them or something else.

I have paid for ExeprtFlyer for years, as I found the fare and availability information useful.

The availability searches have become less valuable due to how airlines dynamically change availability depending on the fare, origin, destination, and other parameters.

The service now doesn’t work for those that have used the service mainly for award class searches and alerts on the airlines listed above. It is unclear what these smaller oneworld and SkyTeam airlines are whose award availability is gone. UPDATE: You can access ExpertFlyer’s page for airlines and award fare classes that are available using their service here.

Let’s hope they find another data source for this valuable information.